Carol Dyhouse: The Eccentricities of ‘Woman’s Fantasy’… and Heathcliff

We are delighted to welcome Carol Dyhouse to Haworth to deliver this year’s annual lecture. In 1847, a reviewer in The Athenaeum found Wuthering Heights ‘a disagreeable story’, complaining of ‘the eccentricities of woman’s fantasy’. Charlotte Brontë described Emily’s characters as full of ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’. Carol will begin her talk with questions about how and why Heathcliff continues to be pictured as ‘a hero of romance’ when his author explicitly warned against this. She will widen her enquiry to consider why ‘woman’s fantasy’ has so often been seen as eccentric, unsettling, pathological or perverse.

Carol Dyhouse is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex, and her research interests are in the social history of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, focussing on gender, education and women’s lives. More recently Carol has established a reputation for engaging scholarly histories which reach out to a general audience. She is the author of Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010), Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (2013), and her most recent book, Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017) was described by The Guardian as ‘a book that invites argument, and which romps along at an appropriately breathless pace’.

Our Summer Festival events are open to all, but members of the Brontë Society have priority booking until Tuesday 1 May, after which any remaining tickets are released on general sale.

*In addition to Brontë Society members, concessions apply to the following groups:
Children, students and people over 65
People in receipt of Personal Independence Payment
People in receipt of a means-tested benefit
Please be prepared to provide proof of status.